Chapter 16

Developing the Design with
Smart Workflows

In this chapter, we will explore scenarios in which building elements repeat, and you’ll learn how
to take advantage of some tools in Revit to help your workflow be more efficient and less prone to
error. Groups and Links are tools in Revit specifically designed to support such workflows and
allow for design and propagation of repetitive entities that can range from entire buildings, to indi-
vidual rooms, and even to furniture arrangements.
Both of these tools require an understanding of some basic principles that will help you make
decisions about when and where to engage these features in a design. We will introduce the con-
cept behind each tool and present a series of use cases in which groups or links provide a useful
solution to a design problem.
Here’s what you’ll learn in this chapter:

◆

Gain understanding of the principles of groups

◆

Understand workflows where groups can be used

◆

Gain understanding of the principles of links

◆


Groups will significantly improve your workflow when you are working with collections of elements
that need to be repeated throughout a project.
When a collection of related elements are made into a

group

, it becomes possible to manage and
change

any

single instance of the group and then have the changes propagate throughout the entire
model—all in one interaction. It is also possible to execute a change on one group instance only and

not

have that change propagate; as you will see, Revit was designed to be flexible.
Revit Architecture 2008 introduced significant improvements to groups, making them an excel-
lent solution when working with projects with many repetitive design elements. You can group ele-
ments in a project or even inside a family and use them to quickly lay out entire floor plans. You can
also save groups and reuse them in other projects, making them quite versatile.
As we’ve discussed previously, Revit categorization is intelligent—objects know what they are
and in what views they are visible. This directly impacts how groups are created and organized.
For example, model elements (walls, floors, furniture, etc.) are grouped as

model groups

, and 2D,
view-specific elements (dimensions, annotations, etc.), are grouped as


accommodations (beds, bathrooms, furniture). The ability to design, iterate, and manage all these
bedrooms will be a major part of the project, which also needs to be easy to maintain, schedule,
and update.
We will work with groups to solve this design challenge and then later look at the same issue
from the vantage point of using links and compare the differences. As you will see, each method
will lead to different results.

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GROUPS

517

Figure 16.1

Repetitive elements
sample model. Model
Courtesy of Felipe
Manriquez, Univer-
sidad de Las Americas.

Creating and Managing Groups

As soon as the building design is roughly oriented on the site and you start laying out the modules
inside the project, you can immediately take advantage of group functionality by defining the basic
room unit(s) that will repeat. Later, you can build more content in one instance of the group, which
then populates into other instances of the group placed in the project.
Early on, you work with walls and rooms to begin creating reliable area schedules in order to see
how the design is stacking up against program requirements. You’d also like to take full advantage

518
CHAPTER 16

DEVELOPING THE DESIGN WITH SMART WORKFLOWS
2.

Create a room and add a door as shown in Figure 16.3. Select the front wall with the door and
one perpendicular wall and make a group by clicking the Group button in the toolbar at the
top of the screen.
When creating the group, we only chose one of the perpendicular walls (the one on the right
side) because we will repeat the module along the length of the space. If you added

both

per-
pendicular walls to the group, you would end up with

overlapping walls

as the unit is copied
along the length of the building. This would result in lots of warning messages to deal with.
Not taking these warnings into account would later affect the scheduling of walls, so you
need to be smart about how groups are made.

3.

Once the Group tool is activated, you’ll be asked to name the group. As soon as this task is


519

The group origin symbol (insertion point) is placed at the middle of group geometry by default—but
you can change it to what you feel will be the most appropriate and practical point of insertion
when you pick the group to reuse and place again in the project. Move the origin to the intersection
of two walls, which will help when placing new instances of the group. To do so, simply place the
mouse over the crossing of x and y and drag it to a new position or use the Move tool.
There are many possible ways to proceed in the group placement process, one being to insert
more instances of this group along this wing of the building using the Copy Multiple Instances or
the Array tool. An alternate approach is to use the Project Browser and drag and drop the group
instances into the view (Figure 16.5).

Figure 16.5

The group can be
placed from the
Project Browser.

1.

For this exercise, let’s try the drag and drop from the Project Browser approach and place
new instances of the group in the floor plan (you can place groups in 3D views as well, but
the common use case is in plan). Once you drag the group from the Project Browser into the
view, release the button and take your time zooming in to the insertion point in order to get
the correct snap without stressing out your hand.
After choosing the insertion point, you’ll see that the walls belonging to the group clean up with
other walls that do not belong to the group. This is perhaps the most profound difference in
behavior between groups and links, which we’ll get into a bit later, but essentially, linked ele-
ments cannot interact with elements in the model they are linked to: walls belonging to a group

To change a group during the process of design, you will select the Edit Group option. This
will take you to the Group Edit mode, where a new floating toolbar will appear.
The screen will turn a washed-out yellow, indicating that you are now in a special Group
Edit mode (Figure 16.7).
The Group Editor in 2008 has some significant enhancements when compared to previous ver-
sions of Revit; namely, the ability to add/create new elements in a group on the fly. This happens
in the Group Edit mode and is facilitated by the introduction of the floating toolbar.

Figure 16.7

The Group Edit Mode
is indicated with a
pale yellow coloring
of the drawing area,
indicating the special
mode. The floating
group editing bar
offers group specific
tools.

The need to change the design is quite common throughout the lifecycle of a project, where the
process is such that ideas evolve over time and are not complete with the first iteration. In pre-
vious versions of Revit, working with groups did not support a seamless creation workflow
where you could place new elements into the group on-the-fly. Now, however, you can make
changes and add new elements to a group while in Group Edit mode seamlessly and at any point
of the design process. You can now access the modeling commands while editing the group (in

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group’s name. The level the Group is attached to and its offset from that level are presented but
not editable.
While in Group Edit mode, move the door to other side of room. When you click Finish, all the
other group instances update with the new door location (Figure 16.8).

Figure 16.8

Editing one group
propagates changes to
all other instances of
the group.

At this stage, you can generate an area report to check the requirements, and the design can con-
tinue to evolve. We will now add the bathroom and some furniture. Both of these will expand on
the concept of groups by making new groups and nesting them inside of the unit group. We will
also add some details (dimensioning) to create an attached detail group. Then, to conclude, we are
going to explore alternatives in the room’s layout.

Adding Rooms to a Group

The next step involves adding rooms so that you can schedule the room units by areas or by
room type.

1.

Select the unit group, and then click Edit Group in the Options bar. Once in Group Edit
mode, use the Room tool to place the room. It will automatically be added to the group
(Figure 16.9).

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make changes to the design.

Figure 16.10

Tag the rooms.

Figure 16.11

Room schedule
showing areas

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GROUPS

523

Nesting a Group into Another Group

Often, repetitive units can be a part of other repetitive units. For example, a typical bathroom unit
will repeat throughout many typical hotel rooms. To support this in an intelligent way, Revit offers
a methodology of nesting a group into a group so that the intelligence of the unit is maintained. The
bedroom group we just created can be completed with the addition of a bathroom group and fur-
niture group that can be nested in it. The nested group/s will appear in the Project Browser as a
subnode of its host group in the Project Browser.
We will follow a natural workflow and start designing the bathroom by adding walls and plumb-
ing fixtures. As these elements will need to repeat in many bedroom units, we will make a bathroom
group by selecting the new walls and plumbing fixtures (Figure16.12). You’ll notice that walls in
groups clean up with walls outside of the group, making the grouped wall interaction with walls out-


Adding Detail Elements to Groups

Now that the unit is more or less complete, you can start adding some annotations and dimensions
to the plan in order to better communicate the design. Begin by dimensioning and adding text or
tags in one of the units. To repeat the dimensions in other units, you can again take advantage of
group functionality.
With the unit group selected, click Edit Group, and then add your dimensions to the group
using the Add To Group button. Because the dimensions are not model elements, you will be
prompted to make a new detail group. This will be attached to the unit group as an

attached
detail group.Once you have a detail group, you can attach it to other instances of the group with relative ease.
To do so, select a group and then use the Options bar to attach the detail group. The details will be
added to the group (Figure 16.14).

Figure 16.14

Details can be
attached to group
instances.

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